One of the sisters at the Shrine Retreat Center warned us all: the center, located in Holy Trinity, Alabama, just outside Fort Mitchell, is on eastern time, even though most resources will tell you Alabama is a central time state.
The reason is that Holy Trinity is close to Fort Benning, Georgia, which is also on eastern time. When you’re at the retreat center, your cell phone goes kind of crazy. Stand in one part of the room, it’ll read eastern time. Move a few feet away, and it recalculates to central time. Uses up a lot of battery life.
The fluidity of time has fascinated me since I was young, perhaps because my home state of South Dakota is split between central and mountain time. When I lived in Mobridge in the summer of 1976, I used to make my best friend drive with me along the Missouri River bluffs: “We just gained an hour!” I’d shout. When we crossed back, I’d moan: “We just lost an hour.” Chris never thought it was as amazing as I did, what with having grown up in the area.
I lived downriver in Pierre, the state capital and a central time town, in 1981 and 1982. When the bars there shut down for the night, there was still another hour to live it up across the river in mountain time Fort Pierre. That had its benefits in the day.
In the summer of 1996, I lived during the week in Indianapolis and headed home to Chicago and my then-husband every Friday afternoon. At the time, most of Indiana was on eastern standard time all year long; Chicago was on central time, but observed daylight savings time. It was hard to wrap my mind around the fact that the time was the same in Indianapolis and Chicago, but they weren’t in the same time zone.
Often, I’m a person of precision. I expect and demand certainty, in part because I like the comfort of not having to think about the familiar because it’s predictable. Perhaps it’s the part of me that rebels against precision that finds something magical about fluid time. Perhaps it’s a side I need to nuture more, the side that revels and finds joy in uncertainty.
